USA

A First America for Both of Us

My trip to the United States in 2009 was not my first visit to America. But it was the first time I travelled there with Pragati, and for her, it was her first international trip. That alone gives this journey a place of its own in our travel memories.

The trip came together in the familiar way many of my journeys did in those years: work first, pleasure fitted around it. The multinational company I was working for in Delhi had its headquarters in Norwalk, Connecticut, and I also had a client visit to make. The two purposes were combined into roughly a month’s stay.

This time, because I was travelling with my wife, the company was considerate enough to arrange a homestay for us. That made a significant difference. We had a small kitchen in the room, so on days when we did not feel like going out, we could cook something ourselves. There was also a mall nearby, though the weather made even a five-minute walk impractical. We would take a cab even for that short distance.

Arriving in winter

We left Delhi on the night of 7 February. After the long flight, we reached the United States the following morning and made our way to Norwalk. An office-provided cab took us from the airport towards Connecticut, and after checking into the Homestead, the first day was mostly about settling in.

For me, the practicalities of a work trip began almost immediately. For Pragati, though, everything was new. She was excited, and she genuinely enjoyed the experience of being in another country for the first time.

My working days were filled with office visits, client work and the inevitable logistics of getting connected and getting things working. Even something as simple as finding the right power adapter for my laptop became part of the first few days. Colleagues were extraordinarily helpful. They picked us up, dropped us back, helped us get around and, in many ways, made it possible for us to experience the place while I was occupied with work.

And then there was the weather.

We were in the Homestead when we experienced our first snowfall. For both of us, it was something to be enjoyed rather than merely observed. We went outside and let ourselves get drenched in the snow. It was one of those simple experiences that needs no itinerary or landmark to make it memorable.

New York on Valentine’s Day

Our first real outing was to New York on 14 February.

It happened to be Valentine’s Day, and Times Square seemed to know it. Everything appeared to be red. After the relative quiet of our work surroundings, Times Square was a completely different experience — bright, crowded and constantly moving.

We took a city sightseeing bus and saw some of the familiar sights of New York, including the Statue of Liberty. For Pragati, this was not simply another sightseeing day. It was part of her first experience of an international city that she had probably known until then largely through photographs, television and films.

I also bought Pragati a Citizen Eco-Drive watch. That watch has survived all these years and she still has it. Looking back, it is funny how a small purchase can become a much stronger memory than many of the expensive things one sees on a trip.

The day also produced one of those very personal travel incidents that probably nobody else would remember. Pragati accidentally spilled coffee on my jeans, leaving a stain. I was not amused. I was thinking about the photographs I would be taking and how the stain was going to ruin them. It was hardly a major travel incident, but these are the kinds of details that remain when the exact sequence of a day has faded.

Working, wandering and discovering America

Most of the trip was still work. The weekdays were shaped by office schedules, meetings and getting from one place to another. But there were enough evenings and weekends to make the journey feel like more than a business trip.

We also discovered that shopping was almost part and parcel of the experience. We had seen malls in Delhi, of course, but American malls felt completely different to us. There was an abundance of clothes, bags and things to browse through, and we enjoyed it.

A friend insisted that I buy a T-shirt from Abercrombie & Fitch. I bought it with some reluctance, but it turned out to be a surprisingly good purchase. We came back with handbags, clothes and the usual collection of things that somehow become part of an international trip.

One of the outings took us to a mall in Stamford. Another took us to New Haven, where we visited Yale and the Peabody Museum. The museum was memorable for its life-size dinosaur skeletons and fossils, along with the many other exhibits. Yale, too, was one of those names that felt very familiar even before we had seen the place in person.

New York, again

We returned to New York on 7 March, mainly to see some of the places we had missed on our first visit.

This time we went up the Empire State Building. It was probably our first experience of going up such a high-rise building simply to look out over a city. From that height, New York became a very different landscape.

We also spent time in Central Park and, inevitably, went back to Times Square. Times Square had already acquired a special place in our memories from the Valentine’s Day visit, and it was still as bustling and alive as before.

We also went to the place where the Twin Towers had stood. In 2009, the site still felt remarkably blank to me. It was difficult to reconcile the empty space with the images of the towers that had become part of the world’s collective memory after September 11.

There was also a pizza somewhere near the Empire State Building that tasted extraordinarily good that day. Whether it really was that good or whether we were simply extremely hungry is impossible to say now. Perhaps the old saying is right: the taste of food is partly in the hunger.

A month that belonged to both work and travel

By the time we left, the trip had become much more than the client and headquarters visits that had brought me there.

For me, it was another work trip that had been made richer by the opportunity to explore. For Pragati, it was something much bigger: her first international journey. And for both of us, it was our first time experiencing snow together, our first New York outings together, our first high-rise city view of this scale and our first glimpse of everyday life in America.

But perhaps what stays with me most after all these years is not one landmark. It is the kindness of the people around us. Our colleagues did far more than simply help me get to work. They picked us up, dropped us back, helped us navigate an unfamiliar place and made sure that two people arriving from Delhi could experience something of the country beyond the office.

The exact details of a month from 2009 have inevitably softened with time. Some days have disappeared into the blur of work, and some places survive mainly through photographs. But Times Square remains vivid. So does the first snowfall. So does Pragati’s excitement at seeing the world beyond India for the first time.

And somewhere in those memories is that pizza near the Empire State Building — still impossible to judge after all these years.